Building the City Beautiful: The Benjamin Franklin Parkway and the Philadelphia Museum of Art

September 9, 1989 - November 26, 1989

Building the City Beautiful: The Benjamin Franklin Parkway and the Philadelphia Museum of Art

September 9, 1989 - November 26, 1989

Between 1871 and 1929 Philadelphia planned and substantially executed a grand scheme to build a broad Parkway, cutting diagonally through
the existing grid-pattern of William Penn's 17th-century plan, connecting the crowded center of the business district with the open spaces of
Fairmount Park, and providing an avenue for automobile transportation to the developing northwest suburbs. The Philadelphia Museum of Art
still houses 170 architectural drawings that document Philadelphia's important contribution to the "City Beautiful" movement, tracing the
development of the Parkway (Philadelphia's "Champ-Elysee") as the intended site of major cultural and commercial monuments which literally
culminated in the building of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, completed in 1928.

Among the drawings, many of which have been conserved over the last three years with funds from the National Endowment for the
Humanities, are splendid large-scale watercolors by French urbaniste and landscape architect Jacques Gréber. Other drawings record the
transition of the Museum's exterior from a classical French structure to the Neo-Grec temple envisioned by Trumbauer, Borie, and Zantzinger,
and the final changes to the interior by director Fiske Kimball that transformed the Museum into a telling monument in the history of
progressive museum planning. The exhibition will also include architect Paul Cret's model for the Rodin Museum, photographs from the
Museum's archives, and about 100 additional drawings, borrowed from local collections, for the other buildings of this cultural complex.

The illustrated catalogue of the exhibition will trace the history of the Parkway as one of the "City Beautiful" movement's most notable
successes, giving attention to architects and planners who have not been properly examined, and detailing the legal, financial, and political
problems that accompanied the aspirations of some of the city's most prominent citizens.